Umphrey Lee

Umphrey Lee
1st Chancellor of Southern Methodist University
In office 1954–1958
Preceded by	Position Established
4th President of Southern Methodist University
In office 1939–1954
Preceded by	Charles Claude Selecman
Succeeded by	Willis M. Tate
Personal details
Education	Trinity University (BA) Southern Methodist University (MA) Columbia University (PhD)

Umphrey Lee (March 23, 1893 – 1958) was a Methodist theologian who served as the fourth president of Southern Methodist University (1939 - 1954). Lee, who had been SMU's first undergraduate student body president, succeeded religious hard-liner Charles Claude Selecman, and is remembered for fostering an intellectual environment conducive to free research and learning.

Umphrey Lee was a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Historical Society, the American Society of Church History, and the Philosophical Society of Texas.

Early life and education

Lee was born in Oakland City, Indiana on March 23, 1893, to Josephus A. and Esther (Davis) Lee. His father was a farmer and Methodist minister; both of his parents were from Kentucky.

Lee attended Daniel Baker College from 1910 to 1912, and received a B.A. from Trinity University in 1914. He received his M.A. from Southern Methodist University two years later, and his PhD from Columbia University in 1931. He worked as a Methodist pastor.

Academic career

In 1919, Lee established the Wesley Bible Chair at the University of Texas. In 1923, he became the pastor of Highland Park Methodist Church, on the Southern Methodist University campus, and taught homiletics. While at Highland Park Methodist Church, now Highland Park United Methodist Church Dr. Lee instituted a new mission program. Beginning in 1929 at the start of the U.S. Great Depression, Highland Park Methodist Church undertook a new missionary outreach in China, with Rev. Hubert Lafayette Sone as their “Special” representative. “During the four years that the Rev. Hubert L. Sone has been our Special we have come to regard him as much a part of the ministry of this church as our preacher in charge.”, From 1937 to 1939, he was Dean of the School of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1939, Lee was named the fourth president of Southern Methodist University. In his inaugural address, he compared SMU, a university that had only existed for a couple decades, favorably with the country's much older elite institutions:

"We can take advantage of a century of educational experience without having to live through it. If one or the other must be chosen, it is better to have a future than a past."

After the Second World War, Lee accommodated an influx of GI Bill students with a small village of temporary buildings called "Trailerville."

After suffering a heart attack in 1953, Lee resigned the presidency and became the university's first chancellor.

Lee remained an active scholar until the end of this life. In fact, he was in his office in SMU's Fondren Library at work on his tenth book, Our Fathers and Us: The Heritage for Methodism, when he suffered a fatal heart attack, dying on the way to the hospital. He was 65.

Legacy

The Umphrey Lee Center at Southern Methodist University

The "Umphrey Lee Center" at SMU is named for him.

Bibliography

• The Lord's Horseman (1928)
• John Wesley and Modern Religion (1936)
• Our Fathers and Us (The Heritage of the Methodists) (1958)